I did some clean-up work on the Death Squad Trooper including putting the legs on the right sides (how stupid am I?) and cleaning the inside of the head a bit better so that it seats properly on the body.

Plus here's my next WIP for the project: Grand Admiral Thrawn. The head is a GI Joe Comic 3 Pack General Arbernathy, the arms, torso and skirt are from a Saga Admiral Ozzel and the legs are from a Saga 2 General Veers.

And for fun here's a group shot of all my Thrawn Trilogy pieces in their various states of complettion -- can you guess which characters the two heads are for ?

Here's a pic from my latest diorama. It's meant to fit on a small shelf (18" x 12" x6 1/4"). The ground is particle board covered with permascene. The background is made from carved styrofoam. The Jedi starfighter is a customized E2 Obi-Wan Kenobi Starfighter. I dremmeled the hull to match the pictures of the damage done to the ship by Jango. The whole ship was repainted in a red wash, then the white was repainted. Extra dings were added and the cockpit received a repaint as did little R4. More pics are available in my gallery at theJawa.com... www.thejawa.com/customs/tykrazen/tykrazen.php

I love the texture of the background, and you blended the paints just right. Think you could give us a run down on how you did it? Nothing extensive, just a little blurb. Very cool diorama, tykrazen!

Sure, it was pretty simple actually. I hacked away at the styrofoam with a metal ruler to "carve" it. I used Citadel's Bleached Bone as a base coat. After the base coat dried, I filled a spray bottle with Apple Barrel Cardinal Red and lots of water. I sprayed the water/ paint mixture liberally all over. The trick with this layer is for the application to be very inconsistent and random. When that dried, I used a 1 1/2 " trim brush (like you would use to paint your house) and dry-brushed Apple Barrel Burnt Sienna. What's critical on this layer is to paint darker in the areas you don't want the viewer's eye to focus and lighter where you do. Since the Starfighter cockpit, the damage, and Obi-Wan form the triangle where I wanted the focus, the wall behind and the ground surrounding that area receieved significantly less brown paint than the rest of the scenery.

If you want to see WIP pics of the piece, it's in the background of many of my Clone Command Center WIP pictures as the two were worked on concurrently.

It's a fan fiction vehicle. I figure it is speeder used to move Republic Army Commanders behind the lines. The chasis is a stripped down GI Joe Mauler Tank, with Vintage Landspeeder wheels (so it can roll) and a Saga Snowtrooper E-Web Cannon.

That is really cool, and different. I might suggest builing up some sort of armor around the top of it, but either way I like this a lot. Cool idea and good execution.

I've gotten quite a few comments on other sites from people saying it would be real easy to take out Tarkin.... stoopid officers having no knees :-P.

I think I'll be revisiting the design later in the week... 1st to give some sort of protection to creepy ole' Tarkin and 2) To add some sort of thrusters.

Someone else pointed out to me that it looked like it was missing something, but they weren't sure what. As I thought about it, I realized all the speeder designs we have seen in the Star Wars Universe have had some sort of thrusters to propell them. I need to dig through my kitbash pile, but I have some ideas where to begin on this. Hopefully I'll have revised pics later this week.